I love the simplicity of this idea.
The team consulted emergency workers from the Haiti and Fukushima disasters and developed a “victim app” and a “seeker app”. “They wanted it simple, unencrypted and smart,” says Al-Akkad.That meant avoiding known problems like low-power, low-range Bluetooth radio links, which often fail to connect – or “pair” – with each other amid the clutter of metallic debris in broken buildings. So they stuck to the much more robust and receivable Wi-Fi radio.
With the victim app a trapped person can write a 27-character message such as “broken leg stuck in bank” or “need help fire on 4th floor” and a seeker app up to 100 metres away can pick it up. The app found two “trapped” people in a large-scale, simulated terrorist attack at a seaside chemical plant in Stavanger, Norway – an exercise organised by the Norway-based research organisation Sintef.
This is the kind of thing that should just ship on every phone.
This works assuming the person has the ability to enter a message. I wonder if it was integrated into the OS, there would be a way to activate it with the seeker app, so someone who’s trapped and can’t reach their phone can be rescued. Of course, this then opens the door to phones left behind and rescue workers searching for someone who’s not there (maybe if people can identify their phone and they can ignore those phones during the search).
Maybe the coming wearables will address this.
Maybe, but I doubt the wearables will have built in wi-fi, due to battery life issues. The current ones that need to, usually connected to a smart-phone via BT to get their internet fix. So, wearables will still have the same issues that the app in the article is trying to get around.
Me neither, I was under the (perhaps out of date) impression that a wearable would be using your iPhone as the long range (cellular or Wi-Fi) communicator. Which means that the wearable’s job is to determine if you are in trouble or not (with a panic feature, or checking your vital signs, etc.)